Ellen Key Quotes

You can be dressed the best and have a wicked heart.

There some trifles well habited, as there are some fools well clothed.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

You never see what you want to see, forever playing to the gallery.

I can tell you all kinds of moral tales, but fashion and reality are vaguely different.

she shall scant show well that now shows best.

Through tattered clothes great vices do appear; Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks. Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw does pierce it.

Sanity - a trick of agreement

Fashion which affects to be honor, is often, in all men's experience, only a ballroom-code.

One man pretends to be rich, yet has nothing; another pretends to be poor, yet has great wealth.

Polished brass will pass upon more people than rough gold.

A fop takes great pains to hang out a sign, by his dress, of what he has within.

The world more often rewards the appearances of merit than merit itself.

Through tattered clothes, small vices do appear. Robes and furred gowns hide all.

Lady Bracknell. Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well. Algernon. I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta. Lady Bracknell. That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together.

We are what we seem to be.

What the philosophers have to say about reality is often as disappointing as a sign you see in a shop window, which reads Pressing Done Here. If you brought your clothes in to be pressed, you would be fooled: for the sign is only for sale.

The gentleman is solid mahogany; the fashionable man is only veneer.

When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.

You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be.

O, what a world of vile ill-favored faults, looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year!

Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it.

A thing either is what it appears to be; or it is not, but yet appears to be; or it is, but does not appear to be; or it is not, and does not appear to be.

Religion is a smile on a dog.